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By creating easily-made, easily replaced goods, industrialist capitalism discourages attachment to objects and is therefore the most buddhist ideology

-- take you could have if you want to make people angry

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This is the best one

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By creating easily-made, easily replaced goods, industrialist capitalism discourages attachment to objects and is therefore the most buddhist ideology

-- take you could have if you want to make people angry

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your unreliable narrator fucking bit me

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you have to be able to defend people who are receiving unjust treatment even if they annoy you even if you personally find them extremely annoying you still have to be able to stand up and say "well thats fucked up"

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In Alien, so the story goes, none of the actors were told about the chest-bursting scene, thus their reactions to it are genuine. But obviously the actors had scripts, and the crew had to arrange and set up the effects, and the actors had to have been aware what the scene generally was and about a visual effect needing a fake torso.

But the only thing the story mentions is the actors weren't told, which I have to assume means the actors knew generally what was coming, but didn't know any specifics, and that's what elicited their more sincere shock. What I think about often is that this kind of surprise was possible through the use of in-camera, practical effects. You could read the whole script front to back and never worry about spoilers because nothing in the script itselt prepares anyone for what's physically on set or on the movie. No cloak and dagger script hiding or draconian NDA or nothing.

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Something I’ve noticed is that leftist movements tend to turn practical, thought out tactics that were part of a larger plan for liberation, and remove them from their context. Then we often use these tactics as symbolic ways to mark our distaste for empire and harken back to older movements. However, these tactics are often already accounted for by the system, and sometimes are actively encouraged as ways to harm our people and defang our processes.

Here is an example;

In the Civil Rights struggle, getting arrested en mass was seen as an important part of the process of freedom. The civil rights leaders realized that the areas they were in did not have large enough jails to confine them all, and that if they filled the jails up, the police simply could not confine everyone else in the movement. Getting arrested in coordinated ways was a noble and helpful sacrifice that kept your brothers and sisters from getting arrested. Due to less strict sentencing at the time, and the ability of the movement to scare the police into releasing people, getting arrested often wasn’t the utterly disabling and free-life ending process it is today. (That’s not to say getting arrested was easy on people; the police brutality of the time was incredibly intense.)

Those who spent time in jail were given almost a reverent status. That had gone through much suffering to keep others from the same fate. Often, their ability to taking confinement completely off the table for the rest of the activists is precisely what allowed for certain other actions to be successful. Paying for legal defense and moderate bail costs was something of a drain on the movements scant, resources but it could often be worth it due to the role arrests played.

However, the state responded to this, and turned it to their benefit. The next fifty years saw a prison boom. Now, economically deprived small towns were made to bid and beg for prisons to be built in there areas; not only to lock people up, but also because working at the prison was presented as one of the only jobs left in rural America. Additionally, thisdrove the labor minded population to be further in conflict with other movements in some areas.

As the capacity of the government to capture and confine increased, the capacity of the movement to fill up the jails and prevent further arrests did not. Now, the system was hungry for more and more bodies for its endless rooms. It further instilled and mechanized the capacity of prisons to force labor, undercutting labor movements. Sentences became longer, parole became stricter, fines and restitutions increased to exorbitant amounts. Those who went in for petty arrests often never came out.

But, the feeling that getting arrested was a noble and venerable goal did not leave the movement. Some transitioned tactics; instead of filling up the jails to allow others to act without recourse, they sought to get arrested in test cases, as they had seen work occasionally before. But this too became more and more difficult, as the legal system realized it did not have to play by its own rules. Slowly but surely, the legal mythology that because it is written and because it is fair, it will be ruled so, began to overtake the minds of activists; even as they failed time and time again to win this way, they still threw countless of their friends into the mouth of the enemy, and condemned them to life in prison.

Even this had become a shadow of itself by the 2000s and 2010s. Arrest became an aesthetic goal instead of a practical one. The most radical in the movements were culturally encouraged to throw their lives away for petty protests that none would see, and would have no material impact on the operations of the system of dominion. The reality that getting kettled at a non violent protest could land you with the same jail time as a political assassination did not dawn upon these activists until long after hey were already in jail, and already disconnected from the movement. Their friends would gather all their meager savings towards bail funds, oftentimes going into debt, or otherwise extracting money from the rest of the marginalized communities supportive of the activism. Those funds would then go to the government in the form of bail, and then right back towards operating the same policing systems that targeted them. In this way, the main economic output of the leftists movement of the time was to fund the very systems of policing that they sought to destroy; and to get themselves and each other locked in cages in the process. Instead of developing practical systems of change, radicals were taught to emulate key aspects of the tactics of prior generations that had specifically been recuperated into the goals of the state.

Those who saw the futility in this were readily pushed towards the defanged and self acknowledged pointless marches of the nonviolent liberal movement, which never had any goal other than to once again emulate the visual aesthetics and personal emotional fulfillment of past movements.

We see this pattern play out all the time. People insisting on the radical importance of a leftist print newspaper in a time when print journalism is dead. A fetishization of industrial unionism in a town where no factory has been for three generations. Arguments over whether to support long defunct governments and long dead leaders for some tactical benefit which will never arise from reality.

It is long past time for us to realize that the process of achieving human liberation does not come from symbolic actions, nor from following the playbook of past movements. We must learn our history, yes, but not to emulate it; instead we must learn it to understand its failures and its successes, and, most importantly, how our movement ancestors interacted with the material conditions of their time to create multifaceted plans that met the needs of their people and made successful guerrilla war upon dominion.

We need to imagine ways of making change that are suited to the times that we are living in, the problems we face, and the opportunities that we have. This utterly necessitates that we get deeply embedded into the places and communities around us, that we listen with open ears to the problems our people are facing, and that we fold those ever more towards opportunities of liberation and care for one another.

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This is what the Sun looks like

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One Tile

Chuck Stephens shared to FB. "Top of the page shows four rotations of the tile. I drew a 5x5 grid and rolled a four sided die to determine which rotation went where."

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megan stories, conducter, from best lesbian erotica of the year vol. 6

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hey girl are you gold and mercury. because. AuHg

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I'm gonna need to actually read this at some point, I have a lot harder time following along with spoken word, but in the mean time this is good.

Hmm. Buy ebook or buy book-book. If I buy book-book I can justify a trip to a book store, which is always a good time. Yeah. Book-book.

I started dreaming about The Murderbot Diaries so I figured it was time to actually read them.

My library has an epic wait list for the ebook, but the audiobook is available, so, here we go.

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"dramatized adaptation" ok anyways it sounds amazing so far, nicely done.

I started dreaming about The Murderbot Diaries so I figured it was time to actually read them.

My library has an epic wait list for the ebook, but the audiobook is available, so, here we go.

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I started dreaming about The Murderbot Diaries so I figured it was time to actually read them.

My library has an epic wait list for the ebook, but the audiobook is available, so, here we go.